|
Post by oxbowfarm on Aug 9, 2014 8:25:45 GMT -5
I've been having some very interesting email conversations about corn lately, and I've been doing a lot of reading regarding flour corn, given how interesting and unusual my flour corn patch is this year with all the great new stuff from maicerochico. I've become interested in the Mexican 8-row flour corn complex, which probably is the ancestor of many or all of the eastern white 8-row corns like Tuscarora, Shawnee, Miami White, Cherokee White, Hickory King, Oksweken, 6-Nations White, etc. If you look on the description of Harinoso de Ocho, in Races of Maize in Mexico (page 67) it describes a very similar flour corn which they also speculate is ancestral to Olotillo, Tabloncillo, and Jala. So I am intersted trying some of that corn, to include some lost diversity into my corn again. Turns out Native Seeds/SEARCH has a corn that they call " Tarahumara Harinoso de Ocho" so I impulse bought it. Very shortly thereafter I mentioned the corn to maicerochico and he informed me it was junk. Whoops, too late. It arrived yesterday and I can confirm that whatever it is they sent, it doesn't conform to their photograph, and it certainly bears no resemblance to the Harinoso de Ocho described in "RoM-M" I won't even go into a rant on how a seed company expects seed savers to maintain diversity in corns when they only sell corn in 50 seed packets. First, the corn they sent me, which is listed in their catalog as a flour corn, is a flinty dent. There was not a single kernel I would be comfortable describing as a true flour corn. Secondly, 50% of the kernels were yellow endosperm. I counted. I can count to 26. I wasn't expecting a perfect match with what was in RoM-M, just by the picture they have you can see that it is not really an 8-row corn, but WTH? Yellow endosperm, Dent endosperm in a corn you are describing as a flour corn? There are a few accessions that pop up on GRIN when you search for Harinoso de Ocho. None of them are directly comparable to NS/S corn in that they are attributing their corn to the Tarahumara, who live in Chihuahua for the most part, and RoM-M and GRIN attribute this type of corn to Sonora and Nayarit. But a Sonoran accession in GRIN has an image, with very clear floury endosperm kernels. It may very well be that the Tarahumara corn has always been this way, and NS/S gave it a misleading name, but why classify it as a flour corn when it is clearly a dent? I'm sure Harinoso de Ocho is not what the Tarahumara call this corn. So why use a name for a very specific racical type described in RoM-M for a corn that is completely unlike it? And why have a PICTURE on the packet of a pure white corn that looks very floury, when you are actually selling a dent corn that's 50% yellow? Native Seeds/SEARCH has always been one of my most admired seed companies. What the hell is going on? I also remember them selling a lot more corn in their packets than 50 seeds in the old days. Also am not going to go on another Glass Gem rant. I am not a person that expects perfect genetic uniformity in seed that I purchase, but in this case I'm very disappointed.
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on Aug 9, 2014 20:52:39 GMT -5
I also seem to recall them having a few more types (though it could be now that items are entered and removed from the catalogue as they come in and out of availability. For example I could have sworn there were two kinds of Tarahumara Gordo, a regular and a "Rosari", the latter being more colorful. What they have now seems to be a hybrid listing, with the name of the latter and the picture/description of the former (maybe the Rosari population lost so many of it's color genes over the years they grew it it was no longer distinguishable from the regular). And there seems to be soothing iffy about the Paiute sweet corn they are offering as well (I'm not saying that it is not normal for a sweetcorn to throw non sweet kernels, just that when, four or five years ago, I got a packet of Paiute sweetcorn from another source (Kokopelli) it didn't have any floury kernels.
To be fair to them I tend to think this is just something that can happen to corn. The extreme ease of cross contamination and the tendency to lose a LOT of diversity in cases of inbreeding depression means that keeping a strain both healthy AND pure is a delicate balance, and not always easily done, particularly if you are in charge of doing it for MANY strains at the same time. Or why a lot of us who grow corn on this forum have chucked any concept of keeping a strain "pure" or "constant" and go for landraces/grexes that we are free to change alter as we see fit over the years.
For the record here are a few other problem corns I have seen myself over the years
Navajo Robin's egg, Sandhill- Does not appear to actually be the correct corn; unless there are two VERY different strains out there. Ironically if there are, in this case the strain NS/S has appears to actually be the "True" one as the one they have appears to be much closer to what I would think of as a "standard" Southwestern native flour corn in appearance; large well rounded, blocky kernels that are very floury. It's speckling is also very sharp, as one would expect of something that is supposed to resemble rain spatters. The Sandhill strain in contrast, has very small kernels, which seem to be more Eastern in appearance, and not in a good way. They are very squat and squashed like the husk is too tight. They seem to be more or a floury flint, if not a pure flint (if I can shine a light through it, it can't have much floury starch in it). And the speckling such at is is, is much more diffuse and hazy.
White Volta, Richter's Herbs- I'm not sure if it is accurate to say this is not true to type, since I know of no other source of this strain to compare theirs to (and since they have now sold out of it, most of the arguments are probably moot). Nor can I say it was inaccurately described, since the description made no mention of such particulars as kernel shape or type. All I can say is that the seed I received when I got it did not match up all that well to the picture of the cob provided among those of the listing. That picture led me to believe that Volta White was a white flour corn with large; fairly wide kernels; similar to a lot of Southwestern/Mesoamerican corns (which would make a kind of sense, if you are bringing a corn to a tropical region, a tropical corn is probably a good choice.) . What it actually is is a white flint/ dent corn, with fairly small and narrow kernels, similar to a corn belt dent, if not smaller and narrower (some of them are narrow enough to almost pass as a pure gourdseed). I have to assume that what happened was that the photo taken of the cob is of a fresh undried cob possibly still in the "milk" stage; picked for fresh eating (maybe the natives in the Upper Volta still simply pick some cobs early for "roasting" ears) Alternatively the diversity of kernel shapes in the packet leads me to think it is possible that Volta white is actually a Flour/Flint/dent mixture, and I suppose that kernels more in line with the picture may be in the genepool as well, but just not the packet I got (with only about 25 seeds, it's hard to make a clear judgment)
|
|
|
Post by steev on Aug 10, 2014 20:59:26 GMT -5
Oxbow: not to detract from your reasonable, and well-reasoned, rant, but I am struck by the fact that you can count to 26! I can only count to 21. Are you both polydigital and a snake?
|
|
|
Post by DarJones on Aug 10, 2014 21:06:41 GMT -5
Polydactylous Steve. Polydactylous!
Not to be confused with a Pterodactyl.
Also, counting is much easier if you take your shoes off first. Try it, I think you will be a much better counter when shoeless.
I often look through new varieties of corn very carefully to find variant kernels, then plant them separate from the rest of the seed. From time to time, the variant seed are more interesting than the pure line it came from.
|
|
|
Post by steev on Aug 11, 2014 0:44:26 GMT -5
Shoes off first? How do you think I got to twenty, much less twenty-first?
Really; think about it; one extra digit on each extremity=24 digits; add an extra penis (like a snake)=26. I shouldn't have to draw you a picture.
Pterodactyl, my butt!
|
|
|
Post by DarJones on Aug 11, 2014 1:49:33 GMT -5
I'm still trying to reconcile Steve's counting prowess with his purported number of digits. He should be able to get to at least 24. Fingers plus thumbs plus toes plus nose plus ears plus his pterodactyl equals 24. (I wonder if he will spot the subtle humor in this? I may have to tell him the crunch bird joke first.)
Back to the topic, Oxbow, my experience is that most corn is mixed to some extent. That does not make it useless, you just have to put time and effort into cleaning it up and selecting it for the traits you need. I got Cherokee Squaw from George M. a few years ago and had one single stalk that was from a cross with Mandan Bride. While this was not good for maintaining the Cherokee Squaw line, I was impressed with the hybrid performance which significantly exceeded most of the Cherokee Squaw plants that year and each year I've grown it since.
|
|
|
Post by steev on Aug 11, 2014 3:53:49 GMT -5
Dude! You count things you can't look at without a mirror?
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on Aug 11, 2014 10:37:51 GMT -5
fusionpower, that's pretty close to my own thoughts. A lot of what I consider my "best" material comes from small amounts of what I call "intersect" kernels; random finds on cobs that cover TWO traits I am hunting. Those ALWAYS get saved. About half of my small quantity of stippled sweetcorn kernels came from one cob that happened to have some sweet pollen mixed into it's base, or why if I ever get it started it will have a LOT of blue in the mix (in retrospect, I probably should have kept the NON-stipple sweetcorn kernels from that cob in the mix, on the grounds stippling is never universal, rather than toss them in the bottle with the rest of the monochrome sweet kernels. Oh well, maybe I'll catch them the second time around) So is "Viracocha" (from one of the cobs of the Peruvian cache*, a Andean sweet with a strong red chinmark) . So is "Checker Rank" (basically a stippled dent; similar in cob/kernel structure to Hickory King) So, I suppose is "Jo-ge-oh", my current name for the miniature "Breadloaf" kernelled (i.e. flattened and round topped, like a full sized filed corn, as opposed to the narrower kernel outline most miniature popcorn grown around here have) flour (well actually flour/flint, but I only saved the floury kernels)corn I have (though given how much trouble it is likey going to be to get that stabilized, I suspect that, by the end, I'll have re-named it "Puckwudgie"! g>) So, when you get down to it, are MOST of the "selected corns" I have accumulated over the years. Most are either single kernel, or single cob (which is basically one generation from single kernel) .
It's a little unclear from the paper, oxbowfarm but is the author implying that ALL eight rowed corns may share some decent from this pool? It's just one of my Andean corns from the cache is an eight row too, albeit an odd shaped one (the fact it still has to some degree the pointed kernels of some Andeans (what I think the paper referred to as "pepetilla" kernels), means the cob has/had an almost square or cruciform outline; four sides, two rows per side. I wonder if that was/is part the stuff too (I see no reason not, if the race went north to become part of the southern corn complex, there is no reason it could not have gone south as well.
* I refer to the cache as Peruvian/Andean, because that is my best guess as to what it is. But it occurs to me that, as I do not know where the cobs actually came from, and that there are plenty of Mesoamerican corns that have what I would think of as "Andean" cob shape (short and fat) The stuff could have easily been Mesoamerican as well (Based on what everyone said that would have produced just as crappily as Andean would have and the stuff actually did.)
|
|
|
Post by RpR on Aug 11, 2014 17:21:26 GMT -5
In the past five years it seems that seeds, from several companies including very large ones, are a hit or miss on failure of entire packets.
In the past I had seed that were five plus years old have a still fairly high germination rate; in the past few years I have had fresh packets with ten percent to zero germination rate.
I thought maybe I had totally screwed up so I used the same packets two years in a row with identical results, whether open pollinated or hybrid.
This year I tried a company I had not tried before, American Seed Company and despite ground that was a bit short of nitrogen, I had good germination, while lackluster seeds from older packets were still lackluster.
When it is multiple companies it makes one wonder. Bob
|
|
|
Post by blueadzuki on Aug 11, 2014 18:03:59 GMT -5
If I was a paranoid person (which I am) I'd wonder if Monsanto had hired people under the table to travel around undercover and spray other peoples corn fields with pollen containing their "terminator" gene (even if they said they would not pursue it, doesn't mean they don't still HAVE it) with the ultimate goal of trying to drive all other corns but their own to extinction; or at least make their germination rates so bad no one will buy them.
|
|
|
Post by kevin8715 on Aug 11, 2014 18:17:38 GMT -5
If I was a paranoid person (which I am) I'd wonder if Monsanto had hired people under the table to travel around undercover and spray other peoples corn fields with pollen containing their "terminator" gene (even if they said they would not pursue it, doesn't mean they don't still HAVE it) with the ultimate goal of trying to drive all other corns but their own to extinction; or at least make their germination rates so bad no one will buy them. Even more reason to save your own seed, though I doubt they are that diabolical.
|
|
|
Post by oxbowfarm on Aug 11, 2014 20:07:02 GMT -5
Back to the topic, Oxbow, my experience is that most corn is mixed to some extent. That does not make it useless, you just have to put time and effort into cleaning it up and selecting it for the traits you need. I don't demand perfectly un-mixed corn, but I demand at least some of it remotely be close to the varietal description. If you lost your Buhl, and bought some from a supposedly reputable vendor, and the packet arrived without a single sweet kernel, just a bunch of dent corn, would you be happy with the vendor? Even if you suspected that it was a BuhlXCornbelt Dent hybrid and it was worth your time to clean it up and select if for the traits you wanted. I may do something with this corn, I may not, it depends on what I hear back from NS/S. If its crossed up with much of their other Mexican/Native American genetics, that's interesting. If its a cross with regular Cornbelt dent, then I'm not interested in bringing it into my corns. maicerochico clued me into an accession of Harinoso de Ocho in CIMMYT. I'm not sure I want to jump through the necessary hoops to get something out of CIMMYT. Maybe I'll take a stab at it this winter.
|
|
|
Post by flowerweaver on Aug 12, 2014 5:07:43 GMT -5
I bought some Hopi Gray Lima beans from them and all the seed was yellow, and grew out yellow. It's barely distinguishable from the Hopi orange I have. I'm not unhappy with it, but I do think the wrong seed was in the right package. I figure some intern grabbed the wrong envelope.
|
|
|
Post by 12540dumont on Aug 14, 2014 16:06:34 GMT -5
Well, that's annoying isn't it?
I always see some diversity. But I get ANGRY when I get something that doesn't germ or is so off type that I don't know what I have. And I absolutely hate getting less than 100 seeds. I prefer 200, but I'm a corn snob. I've been hearing a lot about ottofile/8 row corn for polenta. I have a white one I'm trying next year. PI 433678 Righetto Bianca. One of the things about the Italian corns, is that I have a hard time telling just by looking at them if they are flint or flour. But once I grind them, it's evident. However, I can't grind them till after I've planted them out. They say that this is like Hickory King. Now I thought Hickory King was a dent corn. Doesn't look dent to me. What's it look like to you?
|
|
|
Post by flowerweaver on Aug 14, 2014 17:52:57 GMT -5
I haven't grown it, but on some of the photos of it online the kernels look dented. Although much of my corn project didn't survive, and the blocks were close enough for some mixed up genetics, I ended up with some Oaxacan Green looking like dent and some like flour. Is it possible HK could have a strain of each?
|
|